History and Culture

If the antebellum period of American history was a time
of seeking and becoming, the postbellum era was a time of seeing and being.
The Civil War, which ended in 1865, had largely resolved the division between
the northern and southern states, and the completion of the Transcontinental
Railroad in 1869 marked the fulfillment of the country's "manifest destiny,"
at least in practical terms. Now that the period of division and expansion
was largely over, America began to take shape as its modern self: a pluralistic,
industrialized, and commercial society. During Reconstruction, the period
of rebuilding after the Civil War, the United States ratified constitutional
amendments designed to end slavery and to secure citizenship and voting
rights for black Americans. Meanwhile, women widened their role in the
culture, and immigrants started to flood into the United States. Between
1870 and 1910, some 16 million people immigrated to America from Ireland,
Germany, Italy, and other countries, many of them coming through Ellis
Island in New York. Many Native Americans, on the other hand, remained
on the margins, having been forced from their homes onto reservations.
Over the course of the postbellum period, as well as the ensuing modern
era, these various groups overcame Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and
other forms of oppression and persecution on their way to entering and
diversifying the American mainstream. Many of these "new" Americans helped
to shape the new America by going to work in factories and stores. Despite
Thomas Jefferson's early hope that America would be an agrarian paradise,
the United States now was clearly an industrial and commercial country.
Americans such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt made fortunes
in the steel, railroad, and other industries. Like diversification, industrialization
brought both adversity and growth as a strong labor movement developed
to cope with poor working conditions, child labor, and other problems.

Some cornerstones of modern American culture were laid
between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War
I in 1914. As the modern populace and economy took shape, so did modern
technology, transportation, and recreation. Alexander Graham Bell's invention
of the telephone and Thomas Edison's work in the areas of lighting, the
phonograph, and the motion picture revolutionized the culture perhaps more
than anything else, setting the stage for the information age to come.
Similarly, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford laid the foundations for
modern transportation by developing the airplane and automobile. Even many
modern forms of recreation took shape as Coney Island emerged as a popular
amusement park, and spectator sports--especially baseball, boxing, automobile
racing, and rowing--became major forms of entertainment.